After pulling an all-night shift, Microsoft engineers have now resolved this issue, which lasted approximately 16 hours.

Engineers determined that a number of factors, initially related to a software error, caused several nodes on a single storage scale unit to become temporarily unreachable, Microsoft said in a status update.

“This, along with the increase in load on the scale unit caused by the initial issue, resulted in impact to customers with Storage resources located on this scale unit. Its engineers performed a code update to mitigate a software error, reduced background processes in the scale unit and throttled traffic to allow the unit to recover.”

Microsoft Azure is facing availability issues in the south of the UK, with 11 services from Storage through to App Services all unavailable for many customers.

Microsoft says engineers have been engaged to fix the issue, which started at 13:19 UTC on 10 Jan 2019, and are investigating now.

So an update on the UK South stuff would be good @AzureSupport . Been more than 2 hours since you last said next update in an hour…. *yawn* It's not like your VMs, storage, site recovery and storage apps are all broken. Oh wait…..

A status update: “A subset of customers leveraging Storage in UK South may experience service availability issues. In addition, resources with dependencies on Storage, may also experience downstream impact in the form of availability issues.”

The outage follows a protracted 17-hour outage for multi-factor authentification (MFA) users of both Azure and Office365 in late November, ultimately blamed on an overloaded Redis cache. The issue was fixed by a server reboot.

Azure UK users are predictably irritated, as a series of Tweets aimed at the @azuresupport handle show. It also seemed to be impacting users outside the zone Azure said was affected.